Callisti is a small SEO and website development company, helping local businesses with online marketing and website management.Callisti is based in Dumfries, South West Scotland.Callisti is a non-expansionist company.

Friday, 26 June 2009

Since the last round of development updates, MyWishWand is now easier to use, and works by letting you create and share gift wishlists - normally by parents for children.

We are currently building up the adwords campaign to target specific landing pages so that visitors can navigate quickly to what they're looking for.

If you're stuck for gift ideas there's now a wider selection of lists for events such as baby showers and christenings. The gift-finder tool is another way you can find the "perfect gift" – based on the recipients age, gender and interests.

Members now get access to money-saving offers from retailers including Graham and Greene, Early Learning Centre, Boden, John Lewis, Waterstones, etc.

The celebrity approvals so far have come from Jools Oliver and Mr & Mrs Johnny Vaughan and there have been write ups in Daily Candy Kids, Country & Town House magazine, Junior and Practical Parenting as well as YummyMummyJobs.

Thursday, 25 June 2009

This is a litmus test for an Edinburgh-based Personal Health Screening provider. The market is a mixture of employers requiring employee health checks and private individuals needing professional health and fitness testing and advice.

Wednesday, 24 June 2009

The Delves personal training website finally went live today after a lot of finishing touches. Callisti played a key role in the organic SEO strategy for this site starting with the initial design and development.

We recently got a number of requests for online partnerships from adwords-based URLs so it seemed appropriate to add more detail on what our position is towards using sponsored links as part of a search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.

Saturday, 20 June 2009

The Clydeside Rentals website now has the holiday accommodation aspect of the business included.

Interesting mixture of florida resort images and tipping trailers but the holiday rental side of things is sectioned off so that the holiday cottages in Scotland and the family villa in the Tuscan Hills resort, Davenport, Florida USA, have their own pages.

One aspect of the design template is that sub page menus aren't obvious so it doesn't allow for a page heirarchy without hacking.

Tuesday, 16 June 2009

One of the SEO challenges we face is focussing a website by domain name to the subject area it contains. The interesting case of Clydeside Rentals is that the company rent both trailers and tractor units for commercial hire, as well as holiday home rentals both in Scotland and Florida.

The domain would support both to some extent but it means the website will be fish and fowl. I would normally recommend that each theme is developed as a distinct web entity as it makes more sense to structure information this way - it's rumoured that categorical distinctions are relevant to large search engine indexing.

Monday, 15 June 2009

South West Scotland is characterised by rolling uplands, cattle and dairy farming, sheep farming and forestation. The ubiquitous industry is tourism which takes advantage of natural features and wildlife.

Inland there are mountain bike trails (7 stanes), hill walking tracks (Southern Upland Way), and many historical monuments, most notably relating to Robert the Bruce (Earl of Carrick and Galloway).

On the coastline, which goes from the Solway estuary at Gretna (the border between Scotland and England), along past Auchencairn Bay (Dalbeattie), Kirkcudbright Bay, Whithorn Bay, Luce Bay and Portpatrick (on that iconic peninsula associated with the ports of Stranraer and Cairnryan), there are protected environments for breeds of birds such as at Caerlaverock, and many small sailing and boating clubs dotted along the beaches and bays.

Given that much of the visiting trade to the region is tourism-related, and latterly location-related (such as film companies requiring rural landscapes), there are many small accommodation providers that rely on internet marketing.

The latest requiring Callisti services have been the Annandale Arms Hotel in Moffat and Galloway House Estate in Garlieston, each being established accommodation providers in the region. We carry out SEO work for such websites as well as basic web design and content updates to ensure they keep getting found.

We have now improved the image SEO facility for the Annandale Arms Hotel in Moffat. The image upload feature allows for the original image filename to be preserved as the image is resized during thumbnail creation on the server.

There are some other SEO strategies we'd like to put in place but it may require a change in the hosting service.

Thursday, 4 June 2009

Who you vote for is a matter for your own conscience. That said, I've been doing some work on the Mike Russell MSP website, based on a nice Atahualpa theme. The theme administration is a class above so well worth checking out...